DPR Ministry of Internal Affairs officers check refugees from Mariupol. File photoMOSCOW, March 29Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov called the allegations that Ukrainian refugees are forcibly taken to Russia a lie. «This is a lie. This is not true,» Peskov told reporters, commenting on the claims of Ukraine and the West that refugees from Ukraine are territory of the Russian Federation forcibly. He said that Ukrainian refugees voluntarily come to Russia. «The Russian military helps civilians leave Mariupol, leave places where life is dangerous, and they help, despite the fact that, as it has already become known, these people are in danger when they try to leave these settlements, because they are simply shot in the back. There are already a large number of first-hand accounts of this,» Peskov said. Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. .jpg» />Refugees from Ukraine entered the Russian statistics for the first time. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops and, on March 25, they completed the main tasks of the first stage — they significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation as of March 29, 80% of Ukrainian military aircraft (123 out of 152), 71% of tanks and other armored vehicles (1738 out of 2416), half of the helicopter fleet were destroyed during the month of the operation (74 out of 149) and so on. During the operation, more than 1.3 thousand Russian soldiers were killed, more than 3.8 thousand were injured, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on March 25. Among the Ukrainian side, according to the Russian department, the losses are many times higher: about 14 thousand killed and about 16 thousand wounded. At the moment, the Russian Armed Forces have taken control of such large cities as Kherson (regional center), Melitopol, Berdyansk. Other large cities are blocked for the sake of pinning down the forces of the Ukrainian troops, the possibility of their assault is not ruled out, although this was not originally intended. .As a result of the offensive, the Russian group of troops managed to completely cut off Ukraine from the Sea of Azov, as well as connect the territory of the Kherson region controlled by the Russian Armed Forces with the DPR.The European Union took 3.8 million refugees from UkraineIn the northern direction, Russian troops partially or completely blockaded Kyiv, Sumy and Chernihiv. In the south-west of Ukraine, hostilities are taking place in the area of Nikolaev, which is blocked from the sea by the forces of the Black Sea Fleet. The territory around the Chernobyl (mothballed) and Zaporozhye (operating) nuclear power plants has been taken under control. Eight years later, the North Crimean Canal was unblocked, water has already begun to flow to the peninsula. The problem of water shortage in Crimea, according to the authorities, is no longer relevant. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as of March 24, 1,035 civilians were killed and 1,650 injured during the conflict. These statistics take into account, among other things, losses in the territories of the DPR and LPR, which, according to UNHCHR estimates, account for 56 dead and 211 injured. residents as a result of a strike on March 14 from the Tochka-U missile system. The authorities of the DPR reported that as a result of that strike by Ukrainian troops, 20 people were killed. Against the backdrop of hostilities in a large number of cities and villages in Ukraine, a humanitarian catastrophe is emerging. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation lays responsibility for this on the Kiev authorities, who refuse to coordinate the work of humanitarian corridors, as well as local nationalists, in some cases, according to the military department, holding civilians as human shields.
March 25, 17:00Exacerbation of the situation in the DPR and LPRRefugees from Mariupol in the village of Bezymennoye
